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Looking for an open source alternative to Dreamweaver or another proprietary HTML/CSS editor? Let's round up some of your options.
Not all that many years ago, pretty much every webpage on the Internet was, at some level, designed painstakingly by hand. It was tough, and before CSS really took hold and became well supported across most common browsers, it often involved hacking a layout together by using HTML tables in a way that they were never really envisioned to support.
While some designers developed workflows completely based around manual editing of raw HTML files, the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor began to emerge as a tool of empowerment to millions of amateur and professional designers who didn't know, or at least hadn't mastered, the art of hypertext markup.
Products like CoffeeCup, HotDog, FrontPage, GoLive, and many others filled the market, and many web-based WYSIWYG editors emerged as well. Among the more successful was Macromedia (later Adobe) Dreamweaver, which was among my personal favorites for many years.
These web authoring tools weren't just about WYSIWYG editing; even for those who were comfortable with direct authoring of markup language, these tools offered advantages with template control, file management, and simply reducing the time it takes to create functional code.
But just as these helpful editors were expanding access to webpage creation, something else was happening too. Content management systems like Drupal and Wordpress (and many, many others before them) displaced the need for the average content producer to need to edit raw HTML at all. You could easily make a functional website without even worrying about the underlying markup.
So did the rise of the content management system change the web? Absolutely. Did it eliminate the need to hand code HTML? Well, for some people, yes. But as the web moved from a collection of content to a platform for applications, just as many new opportunities have arisen for doing markup have disappeared. Every software as a service application, every social media network, and even many mobile applications, rely on HTML and CSS to render their display. And those content management systems? They still need templates to function.
And though many helpful libraries exist to standardize and simplify the web development process, coding for the web isn't being displaced any time soon. And though proprietary tools are still common, there is a rich collection of open source alternatives out there. Here are some you should consider.
Open source HTML and CSS editors | Opensource.com
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